The fact that I do not post very often does not mean I’m new to the board, although you make a case of it, and it is the only case you make. Patronizing. That’s pretty good debating.
You wrote as a reply:
So, the American government (particularly the Bush administration) is ruthless, yet still concerned about bombing civilians and Friendlies?
Exactly the opposite. The American government (particularly the Bush administration) is unconcerned about civilian casualty. When I say Government I mean Government, not the general public.
I admit the remark about the Third Reich was not called for.
We “could” militarily have easily destroyed them. We chose not to for politicl reasons. In fact, looking at the conflict now, one can see that, in essence, the US refused to win and was too strong to lose. Ultimately, Vietnam was a political failure, not a military one.
Our soldiers were still far superior. Simply because the Russians beat the Germans in WWII, does not make the Russians better soldiers. They sucked. They were horrible at it. They had poor gear and almost no training. Sometimes wars hinge on other factors than the quality of soldiers. And our troops are far, far better now.
You are absolutely right about this. Returning to the OP. If we had genetically altered super-soldiers going into Viet-Nam at that time with no political will or public support to fight the war, do you think we would have won? I don’t think so.
At the beginning of WWII Germany had the most advanced military in the world. Close to it’s end all that superiority had evaporated due to attrition. It was numbers that won. Russian troops were poorly trained, but they had motivation. German troops were weary of war and had no motivation.
Zun Tzu wrote. When war starts, politicians should not take any part of it, that should be the generals job. When war finishes, the general should take no part in politics.
That is why spending billions on super-soldiers is a bad idea.
I would say education was a better way of making better soldiers.
Effective posting takes practice. A person can quietly observe for years and still not be able to effectively express themselves when they finally get around to writing. I’m sure my first 50 posts were lacking in the stellar wit for which I am now renowned.
You’re not clarifying anything. If the American government (particularly the Bush administration) is unconcerned about civilian casualties, then why did you mention the idea in the first place as a counter-argument to bombing from 15,000 feet? and I didn’t say or imply “general public” either.
You mean:
It’s a stupid question and gets accordingly useless results. Besides, I don’t base my opinions on majority rule. If I was right and 99.99% of the population was wrong, I’d still be right.
Ultimately, though, your most cost-effective route is to improve your entire population through eliminating certain childhood diseases, better education, encouraging exercise and youth sports etc. Then, when it comes time to pick the top one percent of one percent to form your elite force, you’ll get a slightly better selection. No laboratory is likely to give you better results than all the random mixing that goes on in a population of three hundred million.
Uh oh, sounds familiar. Third Reich?
Hmm, eliminating childhood disease, improving education and promoting physical fitness makes me a Nazi, now?
stop quote
Ok since you refuse to let this go.
We are referring to making better soldiers.
It is very fascist to gear up the youth athletic programs, outdoor activities (like the boyscouts) of the whole nation for the sole purpose of war. This is exactly what the Third Reich did.
Eliminating childhood diseases, what exactly does that mean for you? If you mean find a cure for non hereditary diseases, fine. If it is hereditary what then? You will never eliminate hereditary diseases without selective breeding (Nazi style) or genetic engineering. So there you have it.
Depends on what you mean by “cure”. If you mean that the only way to cure genetic diseases is to remove them from the germ line, then yes genetic engineering or genetic counseling is needed. But let’s take an example of dwarfism, where the body has a mutation so that not enough growth hormone is produced. If you give the child synthetic growth hormone they will grow normally. Bingo, genetic disease cured. Sure, they will pass the genes on to their children, but so what? Cure them too.
We left for political reasons. We did not lose the military war. We achieved a military kill ratio of roughly 19 to 1. We completely wiped out the VC. Politicians pulled us out.
You can’t attribute a political withdraw to an ineffective military. The military did everything it was asked to do, even with one hand tied behind it’s back.
Besides, most of those in vietnam were conscripts. The cream of the army was in Europe, defending against a Russian invasion.
So, if our conscripts can completely dominate the field like that in an environment which favors the enemy, if anything - then our regular, volunteer soldiers, with in most cases superior training over that era, should hold pretty well.
You appear to have no idea of the military aspects of things which you speak of, so I’d avoid making broad generalizations about the effectiveness of an armed force.
As long as I’m commenting on military history, this isn’t really true. The russians were good, in the late war. They learned how to fight, and they outfought the Germans most of the time from mid-1943 on. The idea of a stupid, ill trained Russian untermenschen swarming elite German soldiers was German propoganda - reinforced in the Western world by the cold war, where we wanted to portray our enemies as bumbling morons who could only win by huge masses.
I understand people in the Third Reich also wore wristwatches. I wear a wristwatch. By your logic, that makes me a citizen of the Third Reich.
I’m not talking about turning the whole society into a war machine. I mentioned (twice) that the elite soldiers are the top one percent of one percent of the population, a tiny minority.
It could mean improved vaccinations against common childhood diseases, as well as better antibiotics and better prenatal care. You’re so eager to call me a Nazi that you’re jumping to wild (and comically stupid) conclusions.
Selective breeding is a lousy, inefficient way to improve a population, incidentally. It’s slow and unpredictable. A better approach would be genetic testing for parents who have family histories of inheritible diseases like asthma, cystic fibrosis, hemophilia, Tay-Sacs, sickle-cell anemia etc. and want their children fertilized in vitro and the embryos checked before implantation, thus making sure those children will not be carriers or sufferers of the affliction. Make this service free (or at least inexpensive) and tell parents they can eliminate the chance that their children will suffer these diseases. If I’d watched a sibling or parent die of Huntingdon’s, I’d want to make sure I wasn’t a carrier. And if I was a carrier, I want to make sure my kids weren’t also carriers, or sufferers.
This is, to me, the best and noblest application of genetics: to eliminate misery before it is suffered. Economically, it’s always going be to easier to eliminate traits (provided the genetic markers are easy to find) than to add traits. Selecting out the embryo with thalassemia is fairly easy. Trying to endow an embryo with X-ray vision is much harder. So much for super-soldiers.
Anyway, simple mathematical logic says that the larger the pool of people, the greater the extremes. If you pick 10 people at random and run a race to see who is the fastest, and then pick 100 people at random and run another race, the winner in the second group is probably faster than the winner in the first group. By reducing the most common things that make children unhealthy, like disease (with vaccinations and health care) and obesity (by encouraging exercise and sports), a society can increase their pool of healthy children and improve the odds that the extreme high end will be better soldiers. This is just one benefit, actually. In the process, more of the children will probably grow up to be healthy adults, who will live longer and be more creative and more productive, even the 99.99% who don’t join the army.
Now, if you’d rather be lazy and just keep making accusations of fascism and Nazism because thinking logically hurts too much, that’s your right. At least learn how to use the QUOTE feature properly. If you’ve been reading this board as long as you claim, you must have noticed that it makes posts more readable than simple cut-and-paste.
You wrote:
We left for political reasons. We did not lose the military war. We achieved a military kill ratio of roughly 19 to 1. We completely wiped out the VC. Politicians pulled us out.
Killratio has nothing to do with winning a war, and I seriously doubt the validity of this so called killratio. (unless you include civilian killings of course )
Quote: from My Lai Courts-Martial
“Military leaders encouraged and rewarded kills in an effort to produce impressive body counts that could be reported to Saigon as an indication of progress. GIs joked that “anything that’s dead and isn’t white is a VC” for body count purposes. Angered by a local population that said nothing about the VC’s whereabouts, soldiers took to calling natives “gooks.””
You completely wiped out the VC? That’s strange since they took over once you left.
Your conscript did not dominate the field, that was the VC. The US army completely failed in hearts and mind operations and were more likely to kill entire villages than win them over.
Aha. So when evaluating the effectiveness of an army as a fighting force, we should ignore the kill ratio, and the fact that we won every battle at a platoon level or above during the entire war, and judge only by what POLITICIANS did.
Do you realize how silly that sounds? You’re saying the US armed fighting forces (you know, the guys with the rifles, the jets, the artillery pieces, and all that), are an ineffective fighting force because some politicians (those guys back in Washington) restricted them to a ridiculous degree in their war fighting and then pulled out. You might want to take a look at this.
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There may have been some overreporting, but even given that, the kill ratio is still dramatically in favor of the US forces.
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No, they did not. This shows your ignorance on this matter.
The Vietcong was a guerrila force sympathetic to the government of North Vietnam who operated within South Vietnam. By 1968, they were practically entirely wiped out by US and South Vietnamese forces.
As the war dragged on, we decided to train and equip the South Vietnamese forces to be more self sufficient in their own defense with a steady withdraw of US forces from the region. We made treaties with the Soviets limiting the amount of arms we would both give to the Vietnamese governments. The Soviets broke their word and oversupplied North Vietnam. We broke our promise to the South Vietnamese by not supplying them with any of the arms we promised. We effectively withdrew both our troops and our support, and, not suprisingly, the Noth Vietnamese Army (not the Vietcong) made a military conquest of South Vietnam.
We didn’t “run away”, we decided it would be better to arm the South Vietnamese to fight their own war. And when we withdrew, promising arms support. Our peaceniks weren’t happy with that, of course, so they pushed through their agenda to break our promise. And we did. And, not surprisingly, South Vietnam was overrun. And hundreds of thousands were slaughtered in the Utopian Communist “reeducation” of the country.
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You are ignorant. The US forces won every single battle of the entire war. Let me repeat that. The US forces won every single battle of the entire war. The VC were destroyed by 1968.
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That’s possible.
No, we didn’t. The US military accomplished every task ever asked of it, even with their arm tied behind their back, and won every single battle during the entire war.
Because a political decision to withdraw US troops in favor of arming the South Vietnamese to defend themselves, and then breaking that promise, South Vietnam was conquered by a Soviet-equipped North Vietnam.
The responsibility for this lies SOLELY on the politicians. The US forces ruled the battlefield.
You said that US troops clearly weren’t the best troops in the world because of political decisions of Vietnam. Get it through your head that political failures aren’t relevant when evaluating the effectiveness of US fighting forces. One cannot say they are ineffective because the way the politicians acted. They were effective, and proved it.
I realize this post is a bit repetitive, but you seem like the type that needs something hammered in to really register.
Sun Tzu was wrong. Politicians must have some say in how a war is conducted. If for no other reason, they are ultimately responsible for it. There is a danger here, in getting Hitleritis, as unfortunate condition where the politico tries to control an entire army himself, but that is life.
And often, generals should be involved afterward. Gen. Marshall saved Europe.
I didn’t say they were stupid. But they were vastly undertrained and equpped compared to the Germans. Later one, yes, they got better - but never cam close to equalling the German military expertise. In any event, the Russians won their side of the war in the early days of the conflict, when they stopped the German drive. And they turned it back with a small, skiled core and a huge mass of untrained peasant-soldiers.
Believe me, it is sad so say, but in fact most Eastern-Front battles were fought by very skilled German defenders (after they were turned from Moscow) who lost to huge swarms of Russians. It wasn’t a pretty tactic, but it was how that war was fought. Its no stain on the Russians that their government didn’t really care about them, well, compared to the Nazi threat, anyway.
BTW, hlujarn, understand that in Vietnam the US military was fighting with one hand tied behind its back, hopping on one leg, with a hood over its head, and wielding a six shooter with 1 bullet.
Yanks versus Britan in the Outback Bowl. “Britan, trying to come back from some unsuccessful colonial wars. The United States, a powerful favorite accepting some surprising negotiated ties in recent wars.” “Melissa, what have you got for us?”
Overreporting? It is called mass murder, war crimes.
My link was to show you that casualty numbers were greatly exaggerated and that civilian casualties were considered “kills” Either you missed the point, or you didn’t bother to look.
Here is a quote from the trials:
“GIs joked that “anything that’s dead and isn’t white is a VC” for body count purposes.”
They are. Period. No other military has better trained men and better equipment, nor a better command scruture. Period. You have not produced any evidence against this.
Moreover, you dimissthe www.rjsmith.com link because it, according to you, contains vast civilian casualties. I expect, then, that you say every Vietnam vet personally killed his share of the 4 million or so the North Vietnamese civvies declared dead?
Depends on what your doing, what the side effects are, and why.
Ask a vague, theoretical question, get a vague, theoretical answer.
Yet again another willful misinterpretation of my posts. And I love it when someone puts words in my mouth. I did not dismiss the above link, I merely stated that it is not a valid source of killratio. The story there is actually rather interesting.
DARPA & the US military are aware of the problems you’ve listed & aren’t going to deploy any of this technology until they’ve worked all the bugs out. But we’ll see this far sooner than genetic modification.